If It's Broke...Fix It!

 If It’s Broke…Fix It. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

The American Farm Bureau Federation is asking a federal district court to delay new rules issued by the Department of Labor on a crucial foreign worker program, known as the H-2A program.

GASKILL: Under federal law any regulatory effort is supposed to minimize the impact on small business, recognizing that it’s more difficult for them to implement a lot of these rules. The regulatory flexibility act required agencies to consider the unique needs of small business and in this particular case; we argue that the department of labor failed to do so.

Miller: American Farm Bureau Labor Specialist Ron Gaskill says the program could cause 25 to 40 percent losses in net-farm income for farmers who rely on the H-2A program.  That’s due to higher costs to qualify and participate in the program.

GASKILL: We have a chronic shortage of agricultural workers in this country.  For the last five years we’ve documented that we’ve not been able to fill all the jobs that we have in U.S. agriculture with domestic workers.  So we've needed to go to other countries and bring workers in where domestic workers are not available.  And we expect that’s going to be a continual problem.  We have 15 million people in this country who work at jobs that pay less than they could make working on a farm, but choose not to, because farming is very physical work.  It’s all-weather work.  Often time it’s in conditions like dirt that people simply just don’t want to work in.  So we've having a chronic shortage that we don’t see getting any better.

Farm Bureau is hopeful the court will issue a restraining order to delay implementation of the new H-2A program.

GASKILL: The bigger picture is that we need a fix from the congress on the immigration laws so that we do have a way to have a legal, stable workforce for agriculture that is going to include some workers that do come from foreign countries.  We want a legal, stable workforce and if we can’t get it domestically we need to get it from foreign sources and if the administration frankly is going to crack down on employment of illegals, which is understandable and supportable, then you can't make the only program we have to get foreign workers harder especially for small employers. We forecast a loss of net-farm income anywhere from 25 to 40 percent as a result of this rule. 

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.